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Hi DIYers, Sterling from Alarm Grade here and today we're going to show you
how to do a control panel swap out. We have an older Destiny panel from
Apex. Fourteen zone panel. There are some zone expansion modules here. And
he's got it connected to an older uplink GSM unit. What we're going to do
is replace with a Honeywell Vista 21iP, which is a Honeywell 8/8 zone panel
that has a built-in internet communicator.
We're also going to add a Vista/GSMV 4G, which is a cellular snap-on card
for the Vista 21iP that will replace the existing uplink. The uplink's a
decent unit. You can get alarm signals without having a phone line but it
doesn't support some of the more advanced interactive options that the
Honeywell total connect service provides like the ability to arm and disarm
from your smart phone or from your computer and the ability to get instant
emails and text messages from the system.
So it's going to be a nice upgrade. This panel is quite old. It's got two
keypads connected. When the door and windows are opening, the keypads do
give voice enunciation so we're going to replace those keypads with a 61/60
V which is an alphanumeric programming keypad with voice enunciation. And
we're also going to add a Tuxedo Touch Wi-Fi for the front door keypad.
Beautiful graphic touch screen that has a built in z-wave home automation
controller so that the system will not only be a security system now but a
complete smart home home-automation and security system.
So, we've got our panel door off. We have already labeled all of our wires
that are connected now. So, we've got our four phone wires which we've got
labeled but we're not going to use anymore because we're doing internet and
GSM. We have our speaker wire, our keypad wires, our transformer which is
this plug-in transformer right here, powers the system. And then we have
all of our zones labeled down these vertical zone terminals so we know
exactly what this whole mess of wires are, so that we can remove all the
wires from the panel, take the panel and the board down, and then add in
our new Honeywell Vista 21iP.
So, what I'm going to do now that everything's labeled is go ahead and
power everything down. You should never remove any wires when the system is
powered up. So, to remove power we have a backup battery. It's a sealed
lead acid 12 volt 7 ampere battery. You've got a black and a red spade
connector which connected to the charging circuit of the control panel. You
simply wiggle these off. We've removed our backup battery which protects
when there's a power outage and the only thing powering the system now is
this plug-in transformer here so we're going to...oh, screwed in, so we're
going to remove this screw.
A lot of times, the installer will screw in a transformer so it doesn't get
inadvertently get unplugged and kill power to the panel. So, we remove this
screw from the face plate. And then now we can unplug the battery. You saw
the lights that were lit up are no longer lit up. The system is powered
down. And we're free to go ahead and remove all of the wires. You can see
on this face plate here, you've got some discoloration. That's because
these transformers do get hot over time. I'm just going to set that aside
for now, along with the face plate.
So now we have our small flat head screwdriver, and we're going to go ahead
with the panel powered down and remove all of our existing wires that we've
already tagged. It's very important to tag the wires, because if you don't
and you just start to remove wires, obviously not every board has the same
screw terminals in the same positions and once you've just got a mess of
wires landed over here it's going to be very hard to determine what's your
zone, what's your power.
So, it's very important with any control panel swap out, the first thing
you should do is label every wire. Typically, your panel that you're
removing the wires from will have each terminal screw labeled so, to give
you an idea of what every wire is. There, we got our [Toco] wires, removed
our telephone wires. Now we're going to do our keypads.
The Destiny panel uses a four-wire connection for the keypads whereas the
Honeywell system, we use a four-wire connection so once we start adding
things back that's where we'll deal with just using four of the six
terminals or wires that are there now. But for now, since we're just
removing everything, we're just taking them all. We also have our speakers
connected, again, because the Destiny keypads do have that voice
enunciation that's what the other two extra wires are for. So these screw
terminals are labeled "speakers" and it's the sirens as well as the two
speakers for the keypad.
Now we've got our keypad bus, which is our four wires here, similar to our
Honeywell system. Two for power and two for data. Remove all of those.
Okay, now we've got our keypads and our siren removed. These next two are
for the AC power, or the transformer that we unplugged. Take those off. Now
his uplink unit was getting power from the board as well as this auxiliary
power supply, so he had some relays set up over here, which is going to be
irrelevant on the Vista. So we're just going to remove all of these wires
and they're actually not even going to get landed back onto the new board.
Take that off. Pull this out.
And now we have this beautiful nest of wires for the zones. Go ahead and
remove all of these. Each zone is going to get two wires. This system does
not have any four-wire smoke detectors or glass-break detectors or smoke
detectors. Everything is just simple door and window contacts, two wire
connections for each zone. And like I said before, this panel is broken out
into fourteen different zones. This is a split-level, or a two-level house,
upstairs and downstairs, so it's a mixture of windows and doors in the
bedrooms and the front door, garage door areas. And we'll go through each
of those zones as we add them back. Some of these zones are spliced in,
couple of different loops are spliced together, which is the cause of some
of this nest and we've got them tagged so we can see what's connected.
We'll go through and point out each of that as we add the new zones back to
the Vista.
This control panel box is, unfortunately, not exactly the same size as the
Honeywell panel. So we are going to have to deal with taking the entire can
down along with the board to get the new can in. Obviously if you do a like-
for-like swap out, an older Honeywell to a newer Honeywell, more likely you
can use the existing board, but not the case this time. So, we've now got
all of our wires removed. This is just a jumper wire. So this control panel
is totally not connected to anything and we can go ahead and take it out of
the wall.
So, the control panel box has four Phillips head screwdrivers in the
corner. That's keep the metal control panel or can attached to the wall.
So, we're just going to take our Phillips head screwdriver, remove these
four. And actually, if we just loosen them up a little bit, the way that
this board is, has it's screw holes is we can just slide it up and out. Now
that we have our control panel loose and ready to come out, we just want
one last wire here connecting this power supply to our uplink so we want to
remove that. We're not using the uplink anymore, so this can come out.
Same thing, this transformer is screwed into the wall plate so it doesn't
get removed inadvertently. Simply remove the screw, unplug the transformer
and actually on the back of here, you've got two screw terminals connecting
the red and black, positive and negative AC power to the uplink. We remove
that, and that wire's ready to come out. We can speed it through here. And
so our uplink is now completely removed from our panel.
And we're going to be careful now to take this board out. We've got all
these wires and they're kind of hard to see, but we've got some cut outs on
the back of the panel. So we have to be careful as we pull all of this out.
We want to feed the wires through the holes in the back, just kind of going
wire by wire here. Got our RJ31X jack for the phone connection causing us a
problem here so just going to remove that as well. An RJ31X jack allows you
to feed your telephone wire from your phone block into your panel and gives
you an easy way, or a homeowner an easy way, to remove the security system
from the panel or from the house phone line in case the system is ever
causing you an issue where you can't use the phone line.
So the panel is locked up or there's some sort of communication issue
that's causing an issue or causing a problem with your home phone, the
RJ31X allows you to simply unhook a wire and easily allow the homeowner to
get their phone line back. Obviously, with this installation using internet
and cellular connections, we do not have to worry about any phone
connections. So, we're just going to remove all these wires so we can get
our panel box off. Now got it loose, pull this wire through and through the
back. Okay.
Now we've got to get all our zone wiring, and this is where it's going to
get a little tricky. We do have all of our resistors wired to our zones and
we kind of don't want to damage that or have any issues there once we get
it back, so we're going to do our best to crimp all of these together in a
nice bundle so that we can feed it through this hole in the panel. And of
course we're getting a little bunched up here. Almost got it.
Okay. So, our panel is now completely disconnected off the wall. And you
can see our cutout from our original installation years ago, where our
original alarm guy wired all of the wires to this location. So, we are now
ready to move over and start looking at what we're going to do to get our
Vista 21iP panel ready to be installed in this location.
We're going to have to move these screw holes down a little bit because our
21iP has an antenna that's going to stick off the top. We need a little
more clearance here, so we're going to have to come back and drill some new
holes and get our new panel in. We'll be back in just a moment to finish
up.